Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy – and How to Make Them Work for You

Facebook, PayPal, Alibaba, Uber-these seemingly disparate companies have upended entire industries by harnessing a single phenomenon: the platform business model. Platform Revolution delivers the first comprehensive analysis of how platforms use technology to match producers and consumers in a multisided marketplace, unlocking hidden resources and creating new forms of value. When a company like Uber connects drivers with passengers, everybody wins- except traditional taxi companies, which are scrambling to survive. Assumptions about operations, finance, strategy and innovation all change. Platform Revolution explores the what, how and why of this revolution and provides the first « owner’s manual » for creating a platform marketplace. Revealing the strategies behind some of today’s rising platforms, the authors explain how entrepreneurs-and traditional companies- can thrive in this new world. In cases as diverse as shoes, spices, dating, energy, home appliances and education, Platform Revolution provides the essential guide to unlocking the potential of an economic landscape transformed.

Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

The foremost authority on innovation and growth presents a path-breaking book every company needs to transform innovation from a game of chance to one in which they develop products and services customers not only want to buy, but are willing to pay premium prices for.

How do companies know how to grow? How can they create products that they are sure customers want to buy? Can innovation be more than a game of hit and miss? Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen has the answer. A generation ago, Christensen revolutionized business with his groundbreaking theory of disruptive innovation. Now, he goes further, offering powerful new insights.

After years of research, Christensen has come to one critical conclusion: our long held maxim—that understanding the customer is the crux of innovation—is wrong. Customers don’t buy products or services; they « hire » them to do a job. Understanding customers does not drive innovation success, he argues. Understanding customer jobs does. The « Jobs to Be Done » approach can be seen in some of the world’s most respected companies and fast-growing startups, including Amazon, Intuit, Uber, Airbnb, and Chobani yogurt, to name just a few. But this book is not about celebrating these successes—it’s about predicting new ones.

Christensen contends that by understanding what causes customers to « hire » a product or service, any business can improve its innovation track record, creating products that customers not only want to hire, but that they’ll pay premium prices to bring into their lives. Jobs theory offers new hope for growth to companies frustrated by their hit and miss efforts.

This book carefully lays down Christensen’s provocative framework, providing a comprehensive explanation of the theory and why it is predictive, how to use it in the real world—and, most importantly, how not to squander the insights it provides.

Design a Better Business: New Tools, Skills, and Mindset for Strategy and Innovation

One book that brings together all of the amazing tools that we need to create better businesses, run better meetings and build better futures. Lisa and her co-authors have compiled a fantastic resource guide that is not only beautifully designed but also puts everything you need right at your finger tips — with fast passes, checklists, tips, and guidelines for every step of your design journey. Their double-loop landscape lays out the entire process to follow to build your team, establish your point of view, understand your customer’s world, ideate, prototype and then scale and validate your ideas. If every company, non-profit and community used this book, we’d have a lot more happy customers, clients and community members the world over. Get started today – buy this book! I’m sure you’ll love it as much as I do.

An inspiring yet practical guide for transforming limitations into opportunities
A Beautiful Constraint: How to Transform Your Limitations Into Advantages And Why It′s Everyone′s Business Now is a book about everyday, practical inventiveness, designed for the constrained times in which we live. It describes how to take the kinds of issues that all of us face today lack of time, money, resources, attention, know–how and see in them the opportunity for transformation of oneself and one′s organization′s fortunes.

The ideas in the book are based on the authors′ extensive work as business consultants, and are brought to life in 35 personal interviews from such varied sources as Nike, IKEA, Unilever, the U.S. Navy, Formula One racecar engineers, public school teachers in California, and barley farmers in South Africa. Underpinned by scientific research into the psychology of breakthrough, the book is a practical handbook full of tools and tips for how to make more from less. Beautifully designed and accessible, A Beautiful Constraint will appeal beyond its core business audience to anyone who needs to find the opportunity in constraint.

The book takes the reader on a journey through the mindset, method and motivation required to move from the initial « victim » stage into the transformation stage. It challenges us to:

Examine how we′ve become path dependent stuck with routines that blind us from seeing opportunity along new paths
Ask Propelling Questions to help us break free of those paths and put the most pressing and valuable constraints at the heart of our process
Adopt a Can If mentality to answer these questions focused on « how, » not « if »
Access the abundance to be found all around us to help transform constraints
Activate the high–octane mix of emotions necessary to fuel the tenacity required for success
We live in a world of seemingly ever–increasing constraints, driven as much by an overabundance of choices and connections as by a scarcity of time and resources. How we respond to these constraints is one of the most important issues of our time and will be a large determinant of our progress as people, businesses and planet, in the future. A Beautiful Constraint calls for a more widespread capability for constraint–driven problem solving and provides the framework to achieve that.

Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days

Challenge

In 2002, a clarinet player named James Freeman quit his job as a professional musician and founded . . . a coffee cart.

James was obsessed with freshly roasted coffee. In those days in the San Francisco area, it was nearly impossible to find coffee beans with a roast date printed on the bag. So James decided to do it himself. He carefully roasted beans in a potting shed at home, then drove to farmers’ markets in Berkeley and Oakland, California, where he brewed and sold coffee by the cup. His manner was polite and accommodating, and the coffee was delicious.

Soon James and his cart, called Blue Bottle Coffee, developed a following. In 2005, he established a permanent Blue Bottle location in a friend’s San Francisco garage. Over the next few years, as the business grew, he slowly opened more cafés. By 2012, Blue Bottle had locations in San Francisco, Oakland, Manhattan, and Brooklyn. It was a business that many would have considered perfect. The coffee was ranked among the best nationwide. The baristas were friendly and knowledgeable. Even the interior design of the cafés was perfect: wooden shelves, tasteful ceramic tiles, and an understated logo in the perfect shade of sky blue.

But James didn’t consider the business perfect, or complete. He was still just as passionate about coffee and hospitality, and he wanted to bring the Blue Bottle experience to even more coffee lovers. He wanted to open more cafés. He wanted to deliver freshly roasted coffee to people’s homes, even if they didn’t live anywhere near a Blue Bottle location. If that coffee cart had been Sputnik, the next phase would be more like a moon shot.

So in October 2012, Blue Bottle Coffee raised $20 million from a group of Silicon Valley investors, including GV. James had many plans for that money, but one of the most obvious was building a better online store for selling fresh coffee beans. But Blue Bottle wasn’t a tech company and James was no expert at online retail. How could he translate the magic of his cafés to smartphones and laptops?

Several weeks later, on a bright December afternoon, Braden Kowitz and John Zeratsky met up with James. They sat around a counter, drank coffee, and discussed the challenge. The online store was important to the company. It would take time and money to get it right, and it was difficult to know where to start. In other words, it sounded like a perfect candidate for a sprint. James agreed.

They talked about who should be in the sprint. An obvious choice was the programmer who would be responsible for building Blue Bottle’s online store. But James also included Blue Bottle’s chief operating officer, chief finance officer, and communications manager. He included the customer service lead who handled questions and complaints. He even included the company’s executive chairman: Bryan Meehan, a retail expert who started a chain of organic grocery stores in the UK. And, of course, James himself would be in the room.

The online store was essentially a software project—something our team at GV was very familiar with. But this group looked almost nothing like a traditional software team. These were busy people, who would be missing a full week of important work. Would the sprint be worth their time?

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World

The technology likely to have the greatest impact on the future of the world economy has arrived, and it’s not self-driving cars, solar energy, or artificial intelligence.

It’s called the blockchain.

The first generation of the digital revolution brought us the Internet of information. The second genera­tion—powered by blockchain technology—is bringing us the Internet of value: a new, distributed platform that can help us reshape the world of business and transform the old order of human affairs for the better.

Blockchain is the ingeniously simple, revolution­ary protocol that allows transactions to be simul­taneously anonymous and secure by maintaining a tamperproof public ledger of value. Though it’s the technology that drives bitcoin and other digital cur­rencies, the underlying framework has the potential to go far beyond these and record virtually everything of value to humankind, from birth and death certifi­cates to insurance claims and even votes.

Why should you care? Maybe you’re a music lover who wants artists to make a living off their art. Or a consumer who wants to know where that hamburger meat really came from. Perhaps you’re an immigrant who’s sick of paying big fees to send money home to loved ones. Or an entrepreneur looking for a new platform to build a business.

And those examples are barely the tip of the ice­berg. This technology is public, encrypted, and readily available for anyone to use. It’s already seeing wide­spread adoption in a number of areas. For example, forty-two (and counting) of the world’s biggest finan­cial institutions, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Credit Suisse, have formed a consortium to investigate the blockchain for speedier and more secure transactions.

As with major paradigm shifts that preceded it, the blockchain will create winners and losers. And while opportunities abound, the risks of disruption and dislocation must not be ignored.

Not invented here : Cross industry innovation

This is a amazing book! Amazing for those people that needs to create a dialogue with yourself or into workshops. Because the authors provocate you, providing a lot of tools, insights and examples that, how you could to remix your industry, change your business model, inspire itself in nature, change your business or so, reflect about another industries. This is a excellent book to unite during the co-creation process (and ideation). Is possible to catch it for a meeting about your annual strategy, for example, and give it to all the managers and C-level executives.

Leaders already know that innovation calls for a different set of activities, skills, methods, metrics, mind-sets, and leadership approaches–it is well-understood that creating a new business and optimizing an already existing one are two fundamentally different management challenges. The real problem for leaders is doing both, simultaneously. How do you meet the performance requirements of the current business–one that is still thriving–while dramatically reinventing it? How do you foresee a change in your current model before a crisis forces you to abandon it?

Vijay Govindarajan expands the leader’s innovation toolkit with a simple and proven method for allocating the organization’s energy, time, and resources–in balanced measure–across what he calls « the three boxes »:
* Box 1: The present–Keep the current business going
* Box 2: The past–Forget what made the business successful in the past
* Box 3: The future–Create the new model>

The « three box » framework makes leading innovation easier because it gives leaders a simple vocabulary and set of tools for managing and measuring the different sets of behaviours and activities, across all levels of the organization. Supported with rich company examples–such as Mahindra & Mahindra, Hasbro, IBM, United Rentals, Dunnhumby, Nucor, and Tata–and testimonies of leaders who have successfully used this framework to lead innovation, this book solves once and for all the practical dilemma of how to align an organization on the critical but competing demands of innovation.